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The last stop before the Dome (I think?) should be pretty tidy from top to bottom. I'm especially looking forward to seeing Naito vs Sabre Jr - I expect a Naito win to avenge his NJC and G1 losses, but have certainly enjoyed their matches to date.

Nice to see Ospreay moving up to heavyweight. Not sure if that's a long-term thing, but of all the juniors he'd probably outgrown that level. And I always like to see my forever fave Beretta get a high profile match, which teaming with Okada surely is.

EVIL seems like such a weird opponent for Jericho. I liked EVIL just fine but you'd think they'd keep throwing him against top guys for the limited time they got him. Guess it's probably building up to the re-match with Naito.

Speaking of, that Naito/Sabre match will almost definitely be my favorite of the night!

Jericho vs. EVIL is definitely a weird-feeling match, especially as a main event for the show. I'll be at the show so I'm looking forward to seeing what they come up with, though. I wonder if it will be another of those wild brawls that Jericho has been doing so far in New Japan.

Also, couldn't they have tagged someone better up with Tanahashi? I'm fine in general with Finlay but it just feels like he's filler since he doesn't have any business with Omega or Ibushi.

I'm sure they'll add some more to the event, but there's a lot of heavyweights left out of it (Suzuki, Ishii, Takagi, SANADA, Young Bucks, GoD, among others) that hopefully will have some matches to help shape up their Wrestle Kingdom matches. It's ridiculous how much talent the company has now.

Looks like an outstanding card; the kind Destruction maybe should have been.

There is still World Tag League, as well as Global Wars, but yes, this is the last major stop before the Dome. Most things should be set up by the time Power Struggle is over. I really wonder what's going to happen with Cody at the Dome if he's still NWA Worlds Champion--it appears he won't have a United States Title match before then. I was hoping the NWA Worlds Championship would be defended at Wrestle Kingdom, but that doesn't appear likely at the moment.

Looks like Power Struggle sold out on the first day that tickets were available to the general public. Good on them for filling up the arena so quickly. Jericho seems to be a draw for them.

I'm still salty over it because I failed to get tickets to the show. My dumb ass forgot to get them through the fan club, and then my credit card didn't want to work on the morning of general tickets were on sale. By the time I resolved the issue, the tickets were gone.

I caught them going at it in RevPro earlier this year and it was pretty great, though I still get a bit uncomfortable with some of Ishii's headbutts. I have no doubt they'll tear the house down at any rate!

Well, this happened yesterday and no one's chatting about it. I caught the second half of the show now and enjoyed it for the most part. Good matches, no surprises like last year, just a straight road to Wrestle Kingdom.

Shingo Takagi has been looking just amazing so far in New Japan. Despite LIJ not winning the Junior Tag titles, he looked awesome. Can't wait to see what else they do with him.

Poor Taichi, dropping the belt so soon. Oh well, at least he held a singles title in New Japan. I wonder what it'll set up for Goto at Wrestle Kingdom - maybe Ospreay will be back by then and get his shot.

I dug Ishii and Suzuki a lot. Those guys have no regard for each other, and I honestly couldn't have enjoyed it more.

I was kinda surprised that Jericho won with a Walls of Jericho submission. Naito for the save was expected, but in the post-match backstage interview Jericho said that Naito would never get any rematch with him. So we'll see how they push that forward.

Wrote a column up on the main page on yesterday's Power Struggle/the road to Wrestle Kingdom that's generated some good conversation. Basically, I really enjoyed Power Struggle, especially the three team tag, Suzuki-Ishii, Naito-ZSJ and EVIL-Jericho. Thought EVIL once again looked great in that main event spot, and I'm also looking forward to seeing what they have Naito do to change Jericho's mind (and I've just named half the card there lol).

But I don't what it is, I just don't feel that invested in the characters heading into Wrestle Kingdom this year. The matches are building up nicely, but character wise I'm just not feeling it. I posited in the column that maybe that's because NJPW are essentially trying to follow their modern day equivilant of Rock vs Austin, spending a year on more personal character driven matches probably makes a lot of sense and will be damn useful when building to WK14 next year.